One hundred years of climate change in Mexico

Spatial assessments of historical climate change provide information that can be used by scientists to analyze climate variation over time and evaluate, for example, its effects on biodiversity, in order to focus their research and conservation efforts. Despite the fact that there are global climatic databases available at high spatial resolution, they represent a short temporal window that impedes evaluating historical changes of climate and their impacts on biodiversity. To fill this gap, we developed climate gridded surfaces for Mexico for three periods that cover most of the 20(th) and early 21(st) centuries: t(1)-1940 (1910–1949), t(2)-1970 (1950–1979) and t(3)-2000 (1980–2009), and used these interpolated surfaces to describe how climate has changed over time, both countrywide and in its 19 biogeographic provinces. Results from our characterization of climate change indicate that the mean annual temperature has increased by nearly 0.2°C on average across the whole country from t(2)-1970 to t(3)-2000. However, changes have not been spatially uniform: Nearctic provinces in the north have suffered higher temperature increases than southern tropical regions. Central and southern provinces cooled at the beginning of the 20(th) century but warmed consistently since the 1970s. Precipitation increased between t(1)-1940 and t(2)-1970 across the country, more notably in the northern provinces, and it decreased between t(2)-1970 and t(3)-2000 in most of the country. Results on the historical climate conditions in Mexico may be useful for climate change analyses for both environmental and social sciences. Nonetheless, our climatology was based on information from climate stations for which 9.4–36.2% presented inhomogeneities over time probably owing to non-climatic factors, and climate station density changed over time. Therefore, the estimated changes observed in our analysis need to be interpreted cautiously.